Sedighkia, Mahdi, and Abdoli, Asghar (2023) A hydro-environmental optimization for assessing sustainable carrying capacity. Sustainable Water Resources Management, 9. 40.

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Abstract

The present study proposes an applicable method to determine the population carrying capacity of urban areas in which ecological impacts of river ecosystem as the source of water supply and sustainable population growth are linked. A multiobejctive optimization method was developed in which two objectives were considered: 1) minimizing the fish population loss as the environmental index of the river ecosystem and 2) minimizing the difference between initial population carrying capacity and the sustainable population carrying capacity. The ecological impacts of the river ecosystem were assessed through the potential fish population as an environmental index using several artificial intelligence and regression models. Based on case study results, the initial plan of development is not reliable because ecological impacts on the river ecosystem are remarkable. The proposed method is able to reduce the ecological impacts. However, the sustainable population carrying capacity is considerably lower than the initial planned population. It is needed to reduce the planned population more than 45% in the case study. Habitat loss is less than 35% which means the optimization model is able to find an optimal solution for balancing environmental requirements and humans’ needs. In other words, the optimization model balances the needs of environment and water supply by reducing 45% of population and decreasing habitat loss to 35%.

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